Reading historical sources in the digital age: DHLU 2013 — Symposium (Luxembourg, 5 and 6 December 2013)
On 5 and 6 December 2013, the CVCE (Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe), together with the Jean Monnet Chair in History of European Integration (University of Luxembourg, FLSHASE) and its research programme ‘Digital Humanities Luxembourg’ — DIHULUX (research unit Identités-Politiques-Sociétés-Espaces (IPSE) — and the University of Luxembourg’s Master’s in Contemporary European History, held the DHLU Symposium 2013 at the Cercle Cité in Luxembourg City.
After the inaugural DHLU Symposium in 2009 that focused on ‘Contemporary history in the digital age’ and a second edition in 2012 which tackled the methodological and theoretical implications of considering websites as primary sources, this third edition focused on the various ways in which digital material is used by humanities researchers.
The symposium was based on two broad topics:
Distant/close reading — Data retrieval, analysis and visualisation
These panels covered various themes, including text mining and semantic analysis, quantitative data approaches, network analysis, data visualisation, computational methods and more generally the links between distant and close readings.
Writing history & Assessing scholarship
Once researchers begin to use digital thematic collections, does it change the way they write history? These panels embraced issues relating to the validity and quality of data and research outputs based on digital thematic collections, as well as the evaluation of those collections as a new kind of online scholarly publication.
Research networks such as DARIAH1 and NeDiMAH2 were given the opportunity to present their work and activities and their involvement in the field of digital humanities.
DHLU 2013 also featured a keynote address by Tim Hitchcock entitled Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism.
You can find out more at www.digitalhumanities.lu.
1 DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities
2 NeDiMAH: Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities